Judge’s report.
Thanks very much to Alison Woodhouse for judging our 33rd award in our short turn-around time and for her excellent report detailing her reading process and offering exact and insightful comments on the five winners. We’re looking forward to reading the long listed stories, shortlisted and winning stories in our 2026 anthology Mostly everyone has now accepted publication.
Judging the Bath Flash Fiction Award was never going to be easy and when I received the long-list of 50 I didn’t know how I would get a shortlist, let alone a top five. There are stories here that are clever, meta, deceptively simple, overtly harrowing, historical, surreal; stories using extended metaphors, hallucinatory fragments, brilliant imagery and poetic language, and many many stories with great heart. Faced with such a wide range I began by reading, rereading, reordering my reading, reading aloud. What a wonderful world of flash fictions! But I had to cut to 20 so I sifted openings, endings, titles, figurative language, pace, structure, theme and gradually whittled down to about half the long list. Still five to go and I knew I was going to have to leave some very good stories behind. Solo judging is, by definition, a highly subjective task and I know others may well have chosen differently, but as I couldn’t place some of the stories in a league table (it’s like comparing apples and oranges) I decided to come back to my emotional reaction. Where and how much did I feel the stories. My shortlist consists of those which surprised, delighted, tantalised and above all moved me. My winners managed to do all of this simultaneously. They are, in my opinion, simply outstanding, growing richer with each and every reading and I can’t wait to find out who the authors are. As well as the top five, I’m also giving a special mention to the story ‘Modern Times’,a high concept, well executed examination of a struggling relationship using sex and memories to weave an arresting love story told through objects, reminding us that intimacy is formed in the mind not just the body.
Huge thanks to you all for writing such stunners and making my job incredibly difficult.
First Prize
The egg-wife easy-jogs to market
Glorious, gorgeous language painting the world in vivid colour. The title drew me straight in with its rhythm and hint at fairy tales and children’s stories and this story is indeed seamed with dark longings and a surreal strangeness yet I never felt confused or lost. A liberal use of alliteration ensures the pace skips along and the specificity of detail anchors us in the magical world. It’s rich and rewarding, luxuriating in the power of language to cast a spell. How I love the sentence ‘the wives trill their gratitude, then smooth themselves away, clutching jubilant expectation’. And the ending, as the ‘egg-wife trots homewards’ marking the shift from an ‘easy-jog’, now under an ‘empty sky’, is immensely moving.
Damage
I was immersed in this story and the voice of the boy from the very beginning as he attends his dad’s funeral and I adored Hammond, his granddad, ‘built like a wardrobe, big and rigid, but a wardrobe emptied of everything save its coat hangers. The hangers rattled inside him and sometimes he stopped to press a hand against his chest, to steady the contents’. Thank you for that unforgettable sentence! There are so many others I could quote, packed into just 300 words. It’s so sure footed, laced with sadness and shored up by resilience, the redundant industrial landscape, the ugliness, the damage of the title both to the boy and his environment. This story has haunted me for the last two weeks, the second half frequently moving me to tears. And that ending. Just wow.
Albermarle Street
I loved the holy souls, so humanly rendered in micro stories recalled by Sylvia who ‘slumbers’ in ‘her cast of grime’, building towards the tenderness of the final image as they ‘tuck her hair behind her ears’. What could have been another (depressing) story about homelessness is elevated here to something deeply caring as we are blown like the ‘litter and lost dreams’ through a whistlestop tour of Sylvia’s life and the people who marked it. I particularly enjoyed Jackson ‘dear old friend’ mumbling ‘mighty taters’ as he exits the stage and world. Whilst the events of Sylvia’s life appear a catalogue of losses and mistakes (‘she remembers clever and promising, words of dough that never rose’), and her physical destitution mean she could so easily be ignored, her ghostly memories tell of a fully lived life asking us to look deeper, with love, not just pass on by.
The Siren Squad Tries a New Flyer
This story is so tightly sprung it’s a joy to read aloud. The collective we works fantastically here, as the pack turns against the individual. The energy vibrates from the moment we are launched, literally, into the performance and I found myself tapping the beat, faster and faster, heading to disaster. The middle section, introducing the eel increased the jeopardy, ‘they’re tough like us, cool like us, rather less deadly’. The final image is masterly. I felt this one in my stomach and I loved the tension it created.
Nao Yare Nbadi Yonni
A failed marriage told in a clear, strong narrative voice. It’s deceptively straightforward but there are adjacent stories, hinted at within the limpid prose, perhaps abuse or atrocity, certainly loss. It’s set in Burkano Faso and I looked up the place names and learned about the architectural symbolism of the houses, adding yet another layer. The narrator’s sardonic reflection on her husband’s refusal to wear a hat because it’s a ‘barrier to life’s experiences’ made me cheer for her and I knew then she would survive and in fact he, with his ‘arms scarletting … freckles expanding’ might not. This quiet story crept under my skin and I felt her fury.
